The Tao of Anarchy: There is no God. There is no State. They are all superstitions that are established by the power-hunger psychopaths to divide, rule, and enslave us. It's only you and me, we are all true and real existence though in one short life. That is, We all are capable to freely interact with one another without coercion from anyone. We all are capable to take self-responsibility to find ways to live with one another in liberty, equality, harmony, and happiness before leaving this world forever. We all were born free and equal among all beings on this planet. We are not imprisoned in and by a place with a political name just because we were born there by chance. We are not chained to a set of indoctrinated beliefs that have been imposed upon us by so-called traditions. This Planet is home to all of us. No one owns it. We share the benefits from and responsibility to this Earth. We pledge no oath, no allegiance to no one; submit to no authority. We are all free and equal. The only obligation we all must undertake constantly with consistency is to respect the same freedoms and rights of others.

#FYI: The Runaway General: The Profile That Brought Down McChrystal

‘How’d I get screwed into going to this dinner?”
demands Gen. Stanley McChrystal. It’s a Thursday night in mid-April, and the
commander of all U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan is sitting in a four-star
suite at the Hôtel Westminster in Paris. He’s in France to sell his new war
strategy to our NATO allies – to keep up the fiction, in essence, that we
actually have allies. Since McChrystal took over a year ago, the Afghan
war has become the exclusive property of the United States. Opposition to the
war has already toppled the Dutch government, forced the resignation
of Germany’s president and sparked both Canada and the Netherlands to
announce the withdrawal of their 4,500 troops. McChrystal is in Paris to keep
the French, who have lost more than 40 soldiers in Afghanistan, from going all
wobbly on him.

The
general stands and looks around the suite that his traveling staff of 10 has
converted into a full-scale operations center. The tables are crowded with
silver Panasonic Toughbooks, and blue cables crisscross the hotel’s thick
carpet, hooked up to satellite dishes to provide encrypted phone and e-mail
communications. Dressed in off-the-rack civilian casual – blue tie, button-down
shirt, dress slacks – McChrystal is way out of his comfort zone. Paris, as one
of his advisers says, is the “most anti-McChrystal city you can imagine.” The
general hates fancy restaurants, rejecting any place with candles on the tables
as too “Gucci.” He prefers Bud Light Lime (his favorite beer) to Bordeaux, Talladega
Nights (his favorite movie) to Jean-Luc Godard. Besides, the public
eye has never been a place where McChrystal felt comfortable: Before President
Obama put him in charge of the war in Afghanistan, he spent five years running
the Pentagon’s most secretive black ops.

“What’s
the update on the Kandahar bombing?” McChrystal asks Flynn. The city has been
rocked by two massive car bombs in the past day alone, calling into question
the general’s assurances that he can wrest it from the Taliban.

“We have
two KIAs, but that hasn’t been confirmed,” Flynn says.

McChrystal
takes a final look around the suite. At 55, he is gaunt and lean, not unlike an
older version of Christian Bale in Rescue Dawn. His slate-blue eyes have
the unsettling ability to drill down when they lock on you. If you’ve
fucked up or disappointed him, they can destroy your soul without the need for
him to raise his voice.

“I’d
rather have my ass kicked by a roomful of people than go out to this dinner,”
McChrystal says.

He pauses
a beat.

“Unfortunately,”
he adds, “no one in this room could do it.”

With
that, he’s out the door.

“Who’s he
going to dinner with?” I ask one of his aides.

“Some
French minister,” the aide tells me. “It’s fucking gay.”

The next
morning, McChrystal and his team gather to prepare for a speech he is giving at
the École Militaire, a French military academy. The general prides himself on
being sharper and ballsier than anyone else, but his brashness comes with a
price: Although McChrystal has been in charge of the war for only a year, in
that short time he has managed to piss off almost everyone with a stake in the
conflict. Last fall, during the question-and-answer session following a speech
he gave in London, McChrystal dismissed the counterterrorism strategy being
advocated by Vice President Joe Biden as “shortsighted,” saying it would lead
to a state of “Chaos-istan.” The remarks earned him a smackdown from the
president himself, who summoned the general to a terse private meeting aboard
Air Force One. The message to McChrystal seemed clear: Shut the fuck up, and
keep a lower profile.

Now,
flipping through printout cards of his speech in Paris, McChrystal wonders
aloud what Biden question he might get today, and how he should respond. “I
never know what’s going to pop out until I’m up there, that’s the problem,” he
says. Then, unable to help themselves, he and his staff imagine the general
dismissing the vice president with a good one-liner.

“Are you
asking about Vice President Biden?” McChrystal says with a laugh. “Who’s that?”

“Biden?”
suggests a top adviser. “Did you say: Bite Me?”

When Barack Obama entered the Oval Office, he immediately
set out to deliver on his most important campaign promise on foreign policy: to
refocus the war in Afghanistan on what led us to invade in the first place. “I
want the American people to understand,” he announced in March 2009. “We have a
clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle and defeat Al Qaeda in Pakistan
and Afghanistan.” He ordered another 21,000 troops to Kabul, the largest
increase since the war began in 2001. Taking the advice of both the Pentagon
and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he also fired Gen. David McKiernan – then the
U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan – and replaced him with a man he didn’t
know and had met only briefly: Gen. Stanley McChrystal. It was the first time a
top general had been relieved from duty during wartime in more than 50 years,
since Harry Truman fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur at the height of the Korean
War.

Even
though he had voted for Obama, McChrystal and his new commander in chief failed
from the outset to connect. The general first encountered Obama a week after he
took office, when the president met with a dozen senior military officials in a
room at the Pentagon known as the Tank. According to sources familiar with the
meeting, McChrystal thought Obama looked “uncomfortable and intimidated” by the
roomful of military brass. Their first one-on-one meeting took place in the
Oval Office four months later, after McChrystal got the Afghanistan job, and it
didn’t go much better. “It was a 10-minute photo op,” says an adviser to
McChrystal. “Obama clearly didn’t know anything about him, who he was. Here’s
the guy who’s going to run his fucking war, but he didn’t seem very engaged.
The Boss was pretty disappointed.”

From the
start, McChrystal was determined to place his personal stamp on Afghanistan, to
use it as a laboratory for a controversial military strategy known as
counterinsurgency. COIN, as the theory is known, is the new gospel of the
Pentagon brass, a doctrine that attempts to square the military’s preference
for high-tech violence with the demands of fighting protracted wars in failed
states. COIN calls for sending huge numbers of ground troops to not only
destroy the enemy, but to live among the civilian population and slowly
rebuild, or build from scratch, another nation’s government – a process that
even its staunchest advocates admit requires years, if not decades, to achieve.
The theory essentially rebrands the military, expanding its authority (and its
funding) to encompass the diplomatic and political sides of warfare: Think the
Green Berets as an armed Peace Corps. In 2006, after Gen. David Petraeus
beta-tested the theory during his “surge” in Iraq, it quickly gained a hardcore
following of think-tankers, journalists, military officers and civilian
officials. Nicknamed “COINdinistas” for their cultish zeal, this influential
cadre believed the doctrine would be the perfect solution for Afghanistan. All
they needed was a general with enough charisma and political savvy to implement
it.

As
McChrystal leaned on Obama to ramp up the war, he did it with the same
fearlessness he used to track down terrorists in Iraq: Figure out how your
enemy operates, be faster and more ruthless than everybody else, then take the
fuckers out. After arriving in Afghanistan last June, the general conducted his
own policy review, ordered up by Defense Secretary Robert Gates. The
now-infamous report was leaked to the press, and its conclusion was dire: If we
didn’t send another 40,000 troops – swelling the number of U.S. forces in
Afghanistan by nearly half – we were in danger of “mission failure.” The White
House was furious. McChrystal, they felt, was trying to bully Obama, opening
him up to charges of being weak on national security unless he did what the
general wanted. It was Obama versus the Pentagon, and the Pentagon was
determined to kick the president’s ass.

Last
fall, with his top general calling for more troops, Obama launched a
three-month review to re-evaluate the strategy in Afghanistan. “I found that
time painful,” McChrystal tells me in one of several lengthy interviews. “I was
selling an unsellable position.” For the general, it was a crash course in
Beltway politics – a battle that pitted him against experienced Washington
insiders like Vice President Biden, who argued that a prolonged
counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan would plunge America into a military
quagmire without weakening international terrorist networks. “The entire COIN
strategy is a fraud perpetuated on the American people,” says Douglas
Macgregor, a retired colonel and leading critic of counterinsurgency who
attended West Point with McChrystal. “The idea that we are going to spend a
trillion dollars to reshape the culture of the Islamic world is utter nonsense.

In the
end, however, McChrystal got almost exactly what he wanted. On December 1st, in
a speech at West Point, the president laid out all the reasons why fighting the
war in Afghanistan is a bad idea: It’s expensive; we’re in an economic crisis;
a decade-long commitment would sap American power; Al Qaeda has shifted its
base of operations to Pakistan. Then, without ever using the words “victory” or
“win,” Obama announced that he would send an additional 30,000 troops to
Afghanistan, almost as many as McChrystal had requested. The president had
thrown his weight, however hesitantly, behind the counterinsurgency crowd.

Today, as
McChrystal gears up for an offensive in southern Afghanistan, the prospects for
any kind of success look bleak. In June, the death toll for U.S. troops passed
1,000, and the number of IEDs has doubled. Spending hundreds of billions of
dollars on the fifth-poorest country on earth has failed to win over the
civilian population, whose attitude toward U.S. troops ranges from intensely
wary to openly hostile. The biggest military operation of the year – a
ferocious offensive that began in February to retake the southern town of Marja
– continues to drag on, prompting McChrystal himself to refer to it as a
“bleeding ulcer.” In June, Afghanistan officially outpaced Vietnam as the
longest war in American history – and Obama has quietly begun to back away from
the deadline he set for withdrawing U.S. troops in July of next year. The
president finds himself stuck in something even more insane than a quagmire: a
quagmire he knowingly walked into, even though it’s precisely the kind of
gigantic, mind-numbing, multigenerational nation-building project he explicitly
said he didn’t want.

Even
those who support McChrystal and his strategy of counterinsurgency know that
whatever the general manages to accomplish in Afghanistan, it’s going to look
more like Vietnam than Desert Storm. “It’s not going to look like a win, smell
like a win or taste like a win,” says Maj. Gen. Bill Mayville, who serves as
chief of operations for McChrystal. “This is going to end in an argument.”

The night after his speech in
Paris, McChrystal and his staff head to Kitty O’Shea’s, an Irish pub catering
to tourists, around the corner from the hotel. His wife, Annie, has joined him
for a rare visit: Since the Iraq War began in 2003, she has seen her husband
less than 30 days a year. Though it is his and Annie’s 33rd wedding
anniversary, McChrystal has invited his inner circle along for dinner and
drinks at the “least Gucci” place his staff could find. His wife isn’t
surprised. “He once took me to a Jack in the Box when I was dressed in
formalwear,” she says with a laugh.

The
general’s staff is a handpicked collection of killers, spies, geniuses,
patriots, political operators and outright maniacs. There’s a former head of
British Special Forces, two Navy Seals, an Afghan Special Forces commando, a
lawyer, two fighter pilots and at least two dozen combat veterans and
counterinsurgency experts. They jokingly refer to themselves as Team America,
taking the name from the South Park-esque sendup of military
cluelessness, and they pride themselves on their can-do attitude and their
disdain for authority. After arriving in Kabul last summer, Team America set
about changing the culture of the International Security Assistance Force, as
the NATO-led mission is known. (U.S. soldiers had taken to deriding ISAF as
short for “I Suck at Fighting” or “In Sandals and Flip-Flops.”) McChrystal
banned alcohol on base, kicked out Burger King and other symbols of American
excess, expanded the morning briefing to include thousands of officers and
refashioned the command center into a Situational Awareness Room, a
free-flowing information hub modeled after Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s offices in
New York. He also set a manic pace for his staff, becoming legendary for
sleeping four hours a night, running seven miles each morning, and eating one
meal a day. (In the month I spend around the general, I witness him eating only
once.) It’s a kind of superhuman narrative that has built up around him, a
staple in almost every media profile, as if the ability to go without sleep and
food translates into the possibility of a man single-handedly winning the
war.

By
midnight at Kitty O’Shea’s, much of Team America is completely shitfaced. Two
officers do an Irish jig mixed with steps from a traditional Afghan wedding
dance, while McChrystal’s top advisers lock arms and sing a slurred song of
their own invention. “Afghanistan!” they bellow. “Afghanistan!”
They call it their Afghanistan song.

McChrystal
steps away from the circle, observing his team. “All these men,” he tells me.
“I’d die for them. And they’d die for me.”

The
assembled men may look and sound like a bunch of combat veterans letting off
steam, but in fact this tight-knit group represents the most powerful force
shaping U.S. policy in Afghanistan. While McChrystal and his men are in
indisputable command of all military aspects of the war, there is no equivalent
position on the diplomatic or political side. Instead, an assortment of
administration players compete over the Afghan portfolio: U.S. Ambassador Karl
Eikenberry, Special Representative to Afghanistan Richard Holbrooke, National
Security Advisor Jim Jones and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, not to
mention 40 or so other coalition ambassadors and a host of talking heads who
try to insert themselves into the mess, from John Kerry to John McCain. This
diplomatic incoherence has effectively allowed McChrystal’s team to call the
shots and hampered efforts to build a stable and credible government in
Afghanistan. “It jeopardizes the mission,” says Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow
at the Council on Foreign Relations who supports McChrystal. “The military
cannot by itself create governance reform.”

Part of
the problem is structural: The Defense Department budget exceeds $600 billion a
year, while the State Department receives only $50 billion. But part of the
problem is personal: In private, Team McChrystal likes to talk shit about many
of Obama’s top people on the diplomatic side. One aide calls Jim Jones, a
retired four-star general and veteran of the Cold War, a “clown” who remains
“stuck in 1985.” Politicians like McCain and Kerry, says another aide, “turn
up, have a meeting with Karzai, criticize him at the airport press conference,
then get back for the Sunday talk shows. Frankly, it’s not very helpful.” Only
Hillary Clinton receives good reviews from McChrystal’s inner circle. “Hillary
had Stan’s back during the strategic review,” says an adviser. “She said, ‘If
Stan wants it, give him what he needs.’ ”

McChrystal
reserves special skepticism for Holbrooke, the official in charge of
reintegrating the Taliban. “The Boss says he’s like a wounded animal,” says a
member of the general’s team. “Holbrooke keeps hearing rumors that he’s going
to get fired, so that makes him dangerous. He’s a brilliant guy, but he just
comes in, pulls on a lever, whatever he can grasp onto. But this is COIN, and
you can’t just have someone yanking on shit.”

At one
point on his trip to Paris, McChrystal checks his BlackBerry. “Oh, not another
e-mail from Holbrooke,” he groans. “I don’t even want to open it.” He clicks on
the message and reads the salutation out loud, then stuffs the BlackBerry back
in his pocket, not bothering to conceal his annoyance.

“Make
sure you don’t get any of that on your leg,” an aide jokes, referring to the
e-mail.

By far the most crucial – and
strained –
relationship is between McChrystal and Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador.
According to those close to the two men, Eikenberry – a retired three-star
general who served in Afghanistan in 2002 and 2005 – can’t stand that his
former subordinate is now calling the shots. He’s also furious that McChrystal,
backed by NATO’s allies, refused to put Eikenberry in the pivotal role of viceroy
in Afghanistan, which would have made him the diplomatic equivalent of the
general. The job instead went to British Ambassador Mark Sedwill – a move that
effectively increased McChrystal’s influence over diplomacy by shutting out a
powerful rival. “In reality, that position needs to be filled by an American
for it to have weight,” says a U.S. official familiar with the
negotiations.

The
relationship was further strained in January, when a classified cable that
Eikenberry wrote was leaked to The New York Times. The cable was as
scathing as it was prescient. The ambassador offered a brutal critique of
McChrystal’s strategy, dismissed President Hamid Karzai as “not an adequate
strategic partner,” and cast doubt on whether the counterinsurgency plan would be
“sufficient” to deal with Al Qaeda. “We will become more deeply engaged here
with no way to extricate ourselves,” Eikenberry warned, “short of allowing the
country to descend again into lawlessness and chaos.”

McChrystal
and his team were blindsided by the cable. “I like Karl, I’ve known him for
years, but they’d never said anything like that to us before,” says McChrystal,
who adds that he felt “betrayed” by the leak. “Here’s one that covers his flank
for the history books. Now if we fail, they can say, ‘I told you so.’ ”

The most
striking example of McChrystal’s usurpation of diplomatic policy is his
handling of Karzai. It is McChrystal, not diplomats like Eikenberry or
Holbrooke, who enjoys the best relationship with the man America is relying on
to lead Afghanistan. The doctrine of counterinsurgency requires a credible
government, and since Karzai is not considered credible by his own people,
McChrystal has worked hard to make him so. Over the past few months, he has
accompanied the president on more than 10 trips around the country, standing
beside him at political meetings, or shuras, in Kandahar. In February,
the day before the doomed offensive in Marja, McChrystal even drove over to the
president’s palace to get him to sign off on what would be the largest military
operation of the year. Karzai’s staff, however, insisted that the president was
sleeping off a cold and could not be disturbed. After several hours of
haggling, McChrystal finally enlisted the aid of Afghanistan’s defense
minister, who persuaded Karzai’s people to wake the president from his nap.

This is
one of the central flaws with McChrystal’s counterinsurgency strategy: The need
to build a credible government puts us at the mercy of whatever tin-pot leader
we’ve backed – a danger that Eikenberry explicitly warned about in his cable.
Even Team McChrystal privately acknowledges that Karzai is a less-than-ideal
partner. “He’s been locked up in his palace the past year,” laments one of the
general’s top advisers. At times, Karzai himself has actively undermined
McChrystal’s desire to put him in charge. During a recent visit to Walter Reed
Army Medical Center, Karzai met three U.S. soldiers who had been wounded in
Uruzgan province. “General,” he called out to McChrystal, “I didn’t even know we
were fighting in Uruzgan!”

Growing up as a
military brat,
McChrystal exhibited the mixture of brilliance and cockiness that would follow
him throughout his career. His father fought in Korea and Vietnam, retiring as
a two-star general, and his four brothers all joined the armed services. Moving
around to different bases, McChrystal took solace in baseball, a sport in which
he made no pretense of hiding his superiority: In Little League, he would call
out strikes to the crowd before whipping a fastball down the middle.

McChrystal
entered West Point in 1972, when the U.S. military was close to its all-time
low in popularity. His class was the last to graduate before the academy
started to admit women. The “Prison on the Hudson,” as it was known then, was a
potent mix of testosterone, hooliganism and reactionary patriotism. Cadets
repeatedly trashed the mess hall in food fights, and birthdays were celebrated
with a tradition called “rat fucking,” which often left the birthday boy
outside in the snow or mud, covered in shaving cream. “It was pretty out of
control,” says Lt. Gen. David Barno, a classmate who went on to serve as the
top commander in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005. The class, filled with what
Barno calls “huge talent” and “wild-eyed teenagers with a strong sense of
idealism,” also produced Gen. Ray Odierno, the current commander of U.S. forces
in Iraq.

The son
of a general, McChrystal was also a ringleader of the campus dissidents – a
dual role that taught him how to thrive in a rigid, top-down environment while
thumbing his nose at authority every chance he got. He accumulated more than
100 hours of demerits for drinking, partying and insubordination – a record
that his classmates boasted made him a “century man.” One classmate, who asked
not to be named, recalls finding McChrystal passed out in the shower after
downing a case of beer he had hidden under the sink. The troublemaking almost
got him kicked out, and he spent hours subjected to forced marches in the Area,
a paved courtyard where unruly cadets were disciplined. “I’d come visit, and
I’d end up spending most of my time in the library, while Stan was in the
Area,” recalls Annie, who began dating McChrystal in 1973.

McChrystal
wound up ranking 298 out of a class of 855, a serious underachievement for a
man widely regarded as brilliant. His most compelling work was extracurricular:
As managing editor of The Pointer, the West Point literary magazine,
McChrystal wrote seven short stories that eerily foreshadow many of the issues
he would confront in his career. In one tale, a fictional officer complains
about the difficulty of training foreign troops to fight; in another, a
19-year-old soldier kills a boy he mistakes for a terrorist. In “Brinkman’s
Note,” a piece of suspense fiction, the unnamed narrator appears to be trying
to stop a plot to assassinate the president. It turns out, however, that the
narrator himself is the assassin, and he’s able to infiltrate the White House:
“The President strode in smiling. From the right coat pocket of the raincoat I
carried, I slowly drew forth my 32-caliber pistol. In Brinkman’s failure, I had
succeeded.”

After
graduation, 2nd Lt. Stanley McChrystal entered an Army that was all but broken
in the wake of Vietnam. “We really felt we were a peacetime generation,” he
recalls. “There was the Gulf War, but even that didn’t feel like that big of a
deal.” So McChrystal spent his career where the action was: He enrolled in
Special Forces school and became a regimental commander of the 3rd Ranger
Battalion in 1986. It was a dangerous position, even in peacetime – nearly two
dozen Rangers were killed in training accidents during the Eighties. It was
also an unorthodox career path: Most soldiers who want to climb the ranks to
general don’t go into the Rangers. Displaying a penchant for transforming
systems he considers outdated, McChrystal set out to revolutionize the training
regime for the Rangers. He introduced mixed martial arts, required every
soldier to qualify with night-vision goggles on the rifle range and forced troops
to build up their endurance with weekly marches involving heavy backpacks.

In the
late 1990s, McChrystal shrewdly improved his inside game, spending a year at
Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and then at the Council on Foreign
Relations, where he co-authored a treatise on the merits and drawbacks of
humanitarian interventionism. But as he moved up through the ranks, McChrystal
relied on the skills he had learned as a troublemaking kid at West Point:
knowing precisely how far he could go in a rigid military hierarchy without
getting tossed out. Being a highly intelligent badass, he discovered, could
take you far – especially in the political chaos that followed September 11th.
“He was very focused,” says Annie. “Even as a young officer he seemed to know
what he wanted to do. I don’t think his personality has changed in all these
years.”

By some accounts, McChrystal’s
career should
have been over at least two times by now. As Pentagon spokesman during the
invasion of Iraq, the general seemed more like a White House mouthpiece than an
up-and-coming commander with a reputation for speaking his mind. When Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made his infamous “stuff happens” remark during the
looting of Baghdad, McChrystal backed him up. A few days later, he echoed the
president’s Mission Accomplished gaffe by insisting that major combat
operations in Iraq were over. But it was during his next stint – overseeing the
military’s most elite units, including the Rangers, Navy Seals and Delta Force
– that McChrystal took part in a cover-up that would have destroyed the career
of a lesser man.

After
Cpl. Pat Tillman, the former-NFL-star-turned-Ranger, was accidentally killed by
his own troops in Afghanistan in April 2004, McChrystal took an active role in
creating the impression that Tillman had died at the hands of Taliban fighters.
He signed off on a falsified recommendation for a Silver Star that suggested
Tillman had been killed by enemy fire. (McChrystal would later claim he didn’t
read the recommendation closely enough – a strange excuse for a commander known
for his laserlike attention to minute details.) A week later, McChrystal sent a
memo up the chain of command, specifically warning that President Bush should
avoid mentioning the cause of Tillman’s death. “If the circumstances of
Corporal Tillman’s death become public,” he wrote, it could cause “public
embarrassment” for the president.

“The
false narrative, which McChrystal clearly helped construct, diminished Pat’s
true actions,” wrote Tillman’s mother, Mary, in her book Boots on the Ground
by Dusk. McChrystal got away with it, she added, because he was the “golden
boy” of Rumsfeld and Bush, who loved his willingness to get things done, even
if it included bending the rules or skipping the chain of command. Nine days
after Tillman’s death, McChrystal was promoted to major general.

Two years
later, in 2006, McChrystal was tainted by a scandal involving detainee abuse
and torture at Camp Nama in Iraq. According to a report by Human Rights Watch,
prisoners at the camp were subjected to a now-familiar litany of abuse: stress
positions, being dragged naked through the mud. McChrystal was not disciplined
in the scandal, even though an interrogator at the camp reported seeing him
inspect the prison multiple times. But the experience was so unsettling to
McChrystal that he tried to prevent detainee operations from being placed under
his command in Afghanistan, viewing them as a “political swamp,” according to a
U.S. official. In May 2009, as McChrystal prepared for his confirmation
hearings, his staff prepared him for hard questions about Camp Nama and the
Tillman cover-up. But the scandals barely made a ripple in Congress, and
McChrystal was soon on his way back to Kabul to run the war in
Afghanistan.

The
media, to a large extent, have also given McChrystal a pass on both
controversies. Where Gen. Petraeus is kind of a dweeb, a teacher’s pet with a
Ranger’s tab, McChrystal is a snake-eating rebel, a “Jedi” commander, as Newsweek
called him. He didn’t care when his teenage son came home with blue hair and a
mohawk. He speaks his mind with a candor rare for a high-ranking official. He
asks for opinions, and seems genuinely interested in the response. He gets
briefings on his iPod and listens to books on tape. He carries a custom-made
set of nunchucks in his convoy engraved with his name and four stars, and his
itinerary often bears a fresh quote from Bruce Lee. (“There are no limits.
There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond
them.”) He went out on dozens of nighttime raids during his time in Iraq,
unprecedented for a top commander, and turned up on missions unannounced, with
almost no entourage. “The fucking lads love Stan McChrystal,” says a British
officer who serves in Kabul. “You’d be out in Somewhere, Iraq, and someone
would take a knee beside you, and a corporal would be like ‘Who the fuck is
that?’ And it’s fucking Stan McChrystal.”

It
doesn’t hurt that McChrystal was also extremely successful as head of the Joint
Special Operations Command, the elite forces that carry out the government’s
darkest ops. During the Iraq surge, his team killed and captured thousands of
insurgents, including Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq.
“JSOC was a killing machine,” says Maj. Gen. Mayville, his chief of operations.
McChrystal was also open to new ways of killing. He systematically mapped out
terrorist networks, targeting specific insurgents and hunting them down – often
with the help of cyberfreaks traditionally shunned by the military. “The Boss
would find the 24-year-old kid with a nose ring, with some fucking brilliant
degree from MIT, sitting in the corner with 16 computer monitors humming,” says
a Special Forces commando who worked with McChrystal in Iraq and now serves on
his staff in Kabul. “He’d say, ‘Hey – you fucking muscleheads couldn’t find
lunch without help. You got to work together with these guys.’ ”

Even in
his new role as America’s leading evangelist for counterinsurgency, McChrystal
retains the deep-seated instincts of a terrorist hunter. To put pressure on the
Taliban, he has upped the number of Special Forces units in Afghanistan from
four to 19. “You better be out there hitting four or five targets tonight,”
McChrystal will tell a Navy Seal he sees in the hallway at headquarters. Then
he’ll add, “I’m going to have to scold you in the morning for it, though.” In
fact, the general frequently finds himself apologizing for the disastrous
consequences of counterinsurgency. In the first four months of this year, NATO
forces killed some 90 civilians, up 76 percent from the same period in 2009 – a
record that has created tremendous resentment among the very population that
COIN theory is intent on winning over. In February, a Special Forces night raid
ended in the deaths of two pregnant Afghan women and allegations of a cover-up,
and in April, protests erupted in Kandahar after U.S. forces accidentally shot
up a bus, killing five Afghans. “We’ve shot an amazing number of people,” McChrystal
recently conceded.

Despite
the tragedies and miscues, McChrystal has issued some of the strictest
directives to avoid civilian casualties that the U.S. military has ever
encountered in a war zone. It’s “insurgent math,” as he calls it – for every innocent
person you kill, you create 10 new enemies. He has ordered convoys to curtail
their reckless driving, put restrictions on the use of air power and severely
limited night raids. He regularly apologizes to Hamid Karzai when civilians are
killed, and berates commanders responsible for civilian deaths. “For a while,”
says one U.S. official, “the most dangerous place to be in Afghanistan was in
front of McChrystal after a ‘civ cas’ incident.” The ISAF command has even
discussed ways to make not killing into something you can win an award
for: There’s talk of creating a new medal for “courageous restraint,” a
buzzword that’s unlikely to gain much traction in the gung-ho culture of the
U.S. military.

But
however strategic they may be, McChrystal’s new marching orders have caused an
intense backlash among his own troops. Being told to hold their fire, soldiers
complain, puts them in greater danger. “Bottom line?” says a former Special
Forces operator who has spent years in Iraq and Afghanistan. “I would love to
kick McChrystal in the nuts. His rules of engagement put soldiers’ lives in
even greater danger. Every real soldier will tell you the same thing.”

In March,
McChrystal traveled to Combat Outpost JFM – a small encampment on the outskirts
of Kandahar – to confront such accusations from the troops directly. It was a
typically bold move by the general. Only two days earlier, he had received an
e-mail from Israel Arroyo, a 25-year-old staff sergeant who asked McChrystal to
go on a mission with his unit. “I am writing because it was said you don’t care
about the troops and have made it harder to defend ourselves,” Arroyo
wrote.

Within
hours, McChrystal responded personally: “I’m saddened by the accusation that I
don’t care about soldiers, as it is something I suspect any soldier takes both
personally and professionally – at least I do. But I know perceptions depend
upon your perspective at the time, and I respect that every soldier’s view is
his own.” Then he showed up at Arroyo’s outpost and went on a foot patrol with
the troops – not some bullshit photo-op stroll through a market, but a real
live operation in a dangerous war zone.

Six weeks
later, just before McChrystal returned from Paris, the general received another
e-mail from Arroyo. A 23-year-old corporal named Michael Ingram – one of the
soldiers McChrystal had gone on patrol with – had been killed by an IED a day
earlier. It was the third man the 25-member platoon had lost in a year, and
Arroyo was writing to see if the general would attend Ingram’s memorial
service. “He started to look up to you,” Arroyo wrote. McChrystal said he would
try to make it down to pay his respects as soon as possible.

The night
before the general is scheduled to visit Sgt. Arroyo’s platoon for the
memorial, I arrive at Combat Outpost JFM to speak with the soldiers he had gone
on patrol with. JFM is a small encampment, ringed by high blast walls and guard
towers. Almost all of the soldiers here have been on repeated combat tours in
both Iraq and Afghanistan, and have seen some of the worst fighting of both
wars. But they are especially angered by Ingram’s death. His commanders had
repeatedly requested permission to tear down the house where Ingram was killed,
noting that it was often used as a combat position by the Taliban. But due to
McChrystal’s new restrictions to avoid upsetting civilians, the request had
been denied. “These were abandoned houses,” fumes Staff Sgt. Kennith Hicks.
“Nobody was coming back to live in them.”

One
soldier shows me the list of new regulations the platoon was given. “Patrol
only in areas that you are reasonably certain that you will not have to defend
yourselves with lethal force,” the laminated card reads. For a soldier who has
traveled halfway around the world to fight, that’s like telling a cop he should
only patrol in areas where he knows he won’t have to make arrests. “Does that
make any fucking sense?” asks Pfc. Jared Pautsch. “We should just drop a
fucking bomb on this place. You sit and ask yourself: What are we doing here?”

The rules
handed out here are not what McChrystal intended – they’ve been distorted as
they passed through the chain of command – but knowing that does nothing to
lessen the anger of troops on the ground. “Fuck, when I came over here and
heard that McChrystal was in charge, I thought we would get our fucking gun
on,” says Hicks, who has served three tours of combat. “I get COIN. I get all
that. McChrystal comes here, explains it, it makes sense. But then he goes away
on his bird, and by the time his directives get passed down to us through Big
Army, they’re all fucked up – either because somebody is trying to cover their
ass, or because they just don’t understand it themselves. But we’re fucking
losing this thing.”

McChrystal
and his team show up the next day. Underneath a tent, the general has a
45-minute discussion with some two dozen soldiers. The atmosphere is tense. “I
ask you what’s going on in your world, and I think it’s important for you all
to understand the big picture as well,” McChrystal begins. “How’s the company
doing? You guys feeling sorry for yourselves? Anybody? Anybody feel like you’re
losing?” McChrystal says.

McChrystal
nods. “Strength is leading when you just don’t want to lead,” he tells the men.
“You’re leading by example. That’s what we do. Particularly when it’s really,
really hard, and it hurts inside.” Then he spends 20 minutes talking about
counterinsurgency, diagramming his concepts and principles on a whiteboard. He
makes COIN seem like common sense, but he’s careful not to bullshit the men.
“We are knee-deep in the decisive year,” he tells them. The Taliban, he
insists, no longer has the initiative – “but I don’t think we do, either.” It’s
similar to the talk he gave in Paris, but it’s not winning any hearts and minds
among the soldiers. “This is the philosophical part that works with think
tanks,” McChrystal tries to joke. “But it doesn’t get the same reception from
infantry companies.”

During
the question-and-answer period, the frustration boils over. The soldiers
complain about not being allowed to use lethal force, about watching insurgents
they detain be freed for lack of evidence. They want to be able to fight – like
they did in Iraq, like they had in Afghanistan before McChrystal. “We aren’t
putting fear into the Taliban,” one soldier says.

“Winning
hearts and minds in COIN is a coldblooded thing,” McChrystal says, citing an
oft-repeated maxim that you can’t kill your way out of Afghanistan. “The
Russians killed 1 million Afghans, and that didn’t work.”

“I’m not
saying go out and kill everybody, sir,” the soldier persists. “You say we’ve
stopped the momentum of the insurgency. I don’t believe that’s true in this
area. The more we pull back, the more we restrain ourselves, the stronger it’s
getting.”

“I agree
with you,” McChrystal says. “In this area, we’ve not made progress, probably.
You have to show strength here, you have to use fire. What I’m telling you is,
fire costs you. What do you want to do? You want to wipe the population out
here and resettle it?”

A soldier
complains that under the rules, any insurgent who doesn’t have a weapon is
immediately assumed to be a civilian. “That’s the way this game is,” McChrystal
says. “It’s complex. I can’t just decide: It’s shirts and skins, and we’ll kill
all the shirts.”

As the
discussion ends, McChrystal seems to sense that he hasn’t succeeded at easing
the men’s anger. He makes one last-ditch effort to reach them, acknowledging
the death of Cpl. Ingram. “There’s no way I can make that easier,” he tells
them. “No way I can pretend it won’t hurt. No way I can tell you not to feel
that. . . . I will tell you, you’re doing a great job. Don’t let the
frustration get to you.” The session ends with no clapping, and no real
resolution. McChrystal may have sold President Obama on counterinsurgency, but
many of his own men aren’t buying it.

When it comes to Afghanistan, history is not on McChrystal’s
side. The only foreign invader to have any success here was Genghis Khan – and
he wasn’t hampered by things like human rights, economic development and press
scrutiny. The COIN doctrine, bizarrely, draws inspiration from some of the
biggest Western military embarrassments in recent memory: France’s nasty war in
Algeria (lost in 1962) and the American misadventure in Vietnam (lost in 1975).
McChrystal, like other advocates of COIN, readily acknowledges that
counterinsurgency campaigns are inherently messy, expensive and easy to lose.
“Even Afghans are confused by Afghanistan,” he says. But even if he somehow
manages to succeed, after years of bloody fighting with Afghan kids who pose no
threat to the U.S. homeland, the war will do little to shut down Al Qaeda,
which has shifted its operations to Pakistan. Dispatching 150,000 troops to
build new schools, roads, mosques and water-treatment facilities around
Kandahar is like trying to stop the drug war in Mexico by occupying Arkansas
and building Baptist churches in Little Rock. “It’s all very cynical,
politically,” says Marc Sageman, a former CIA case officer who has extensive
experience in the region. “Afghanistan is not in our vital interest – there’s
nothing for us there.”

In
mid-May, two weeks after visiting the troops in Kandahar, McChrystal travels to
the White House for a high-level visit by Hamid Karzai. It is a triumphant
moment for the general, one that demonstrates he is very much in command – both
in Kabul and in Washington. In the East Room, which is packed with journalists
and dignitaries, President Obama sings the praises of Karzai. The two leaders
talk about how great their relationship is, about the pain they feel over
civilian casualties. They mention the word “progress” 16 times in under an
hour. But there is no mention of victory. Still, the session represents the
most forceful commitment that Obama has made to McChrystal’s strategy in
months. “There is no denying the progress that the Afghan people have made in
recent years – in education, in health care and economic development,” the
president says. “As I saw in the lights across Kabul when I landed – lights
that would not have been visible just a few years earlier.”

It is a
disconcerting observation for Obama to make. During the worst years in Iraq,
when the Bush administration had no real progress to point to, officials used
to offer up the exact same evidence of success. “It was one of our first
impressions,” one GOP official said in 2006, after landing in Baghdad at the
height of the sectarian violence. “So many lights shining brightly.” So it is
to the language of the Iraq War that the Obama administration has turned – talk
of progress, of city lights, of metrics like health care and education.
Rhetoric that just a few years ago they would have mocked. “They are trying to
manipulate perceptions because there is no definition of victory – because
victory is not even defined or recognizable,” says Celeste Ward, a senior
defense analyst at the RAND Corporation who served as a political adviser to
U.S. commanders in Iraq in 2006. “That’s the game we’re in right now. What we
need, for strategic purposes, is to create the perception that we didn’t get
run off. The facts on the ground are not great, and are not going to become
great in the near future.”

But facts
on the ground, as history has proven, offer little deterrent to a military determined
to stay the course. Even those closest to McChrystal know that the rising
anti-war sentiment at home doesn’t begin to reflect how deeply fucked up things
are in Afghanistan. “If Americans pulled back and started paying attention to
this war, it would become even less popular,” a senior adviser to McChrystal
says. Such realism, however, doesn’t prevent advocates of counterinsurgency
from dreaming big: Instead of beginning to withdraw troops next year, as Obama
promised, the military hopes to ramp up its counterinsurgency campaign even
further. “There’s a possibility we could ask for another surge of U.S. forces
next summer if we see success here,” a senior military official in Kabul tells
me.

Back in
Afghanistan, less than a month after the White House meeting with Karzai and
all the talk of “progress,” McChrystal is hit by the biggest blow to his vision
of counterinsurgency. Since last year, the Pentagon had been planning to launch
a major military operation this summer in Kandahar, the country’s second-largest
city and the Taliban’s original home base. It was supposed to be a decisive
turning point in the war – the primary reason for the troop surge that
McChrystal wrested from Obama late last year. But on June 10th, acknowledging
that the military still needs to lay more groundwork, the general announced
that he is postponing the offensive until the fall. Rather than one big battle,
like Fallujah or Ramadi, U.S. troops will implement what McChrystal calls a
“rising tide of security.” The Afghan police and army will enter Kandahar to
attempt to seize control of neighborhoods, while the U.S. pours
$90 million of aid into the city to win over the civilian population.

Even
proponents of counterinsurgency are hard-pressed to explain the new plan. “This
isn’t a classic operation,” says a U.S. military official. “It’s not going to
be Black Hawk Down. There aren’t going to be doors kicked in.” Other U.S.
officials insist that doors are going to be kicked in, but that it’s
going to be a kinder, gentler offensive than the disaster in Marja. “The
Taliban have a jackboot on the city,” says a military official. “We have to
remove them, but we have to do it in a way that doesn’t alienate the
population.” When Vice President Biden was briefed on the new plan in the Oval
Office, insiders say he was shocked to see how much it mirrored the more
gradual plan of counterterrorism that he advocated last fall. “This looks like
CT-plus!” he said, according to U.S. officials familiar with the meeting.

Whatever
the nature of the new plan, the delay underscores the fundamental flaws of
counterinsurgency. After nine years of war, the Taliban simply remains too
strongly entrenched for the U.S. military to openly attack. The very people
that COIN seeks to win over – the Afghan people – do not want us there. Our
supposed ally, President Karzai, used his influence to delay the offensive, and
the massive influx of aid championed by McChrystal is likely only to make
things worse. “Throwing money at the problem exacerbates the problem,” says
Andrew Wilder, an expert at Tufts University who has studied the effect of aid
in southern Afghanistan. “A tsunami of cash fuels corruption, delegitimizes the
government and creates an environment where we’re picking winners and losers” –
a process that fuels resentment and hostility among the civilian population. So
far, counterinsurgency has succeeded only in creating a never-ending demand for
the primary product supplied by the military: perpetual war. There is a reason
that President Obama studiously avoids using the word “victory” when he talks
about Afghanistan. Winning, it would seem, is not really possible. Not even
with Stanley McChrystal in charge.